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“This is the one thing I hope: that she never stopped. I hope when her body couldn’t run any farther she left it behind like everything else that tried to hold her down, she floored the pedal and she went like wildfire, streamed down night freeways with both hands off the wheel and her head back screaming to the sky like a lynx, white lines and green lights whipping away into the dark, her tires inches off the ground and freedom crashing up her spine. I hope every second she could have had came flooding through that cottage like speed wind: ribbons and sea spray, a wedding ring and Chad’s mother crying, sun-wrinkles and gallops through wild red brush, a baby’s first tooth and its shoulder blades like tiny wings in Amsterdam Toronto Dubai; hawthorn flowers spinning through summer air, Daniel’s hair turning gray under high ceilings and candle flames and the sweet cadences of Abby’s singing. Time works so hard for us, Daniel told me once. I hope those last few minutes worked like hell for her. I hope in that half hour she lived all her million lives.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“If I had to get there without friends, I could do it. Had been doing it. I'd never met anyone who brought me somewhere I wanted to stay, looked at me and saw someone I wanted to be for good; anyone who was worth giving up the more I wanted down the line.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Everyone knows a wife and kids tie you down. What people miss sometimes is that mates, the proper kind, they do the same just as hard. Mates mean you've settled, made your bargain: this, wherever you are together, this is as far as you're going, ever. This is your stop; this is where you get off.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“I used to believe, bless my naive little heart, that I had something to offer the robbed dead. Not revenge-there’s no revenge in the world that could return the tiniest fraction of what they’ve lost-and not justice, whatever that means, but the one thing left to give them: the truth. I was good at it. I had one, at least, of the things that make a great detective: the instinct for truth, the inner magnet whose pull tells you beyond any doubt what’s dross, what’s alloy, and what’s the pure, uncut metal. I dug out the nuggets without caring when they cut my fingers and brought them in my cupped hands to lay on graves, until I found out-Operation Vestal again-how slippery they were, how easily they crumbled, how deep they sliced and, in the end, how very little they were worth.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“I loved him, you know,' she said. 'I would have loved him as hard as he'd let me, for the rest of my life.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“If I believed in curses, I would believe that this is mine: when it matters most, in the moments when I know with the greatest clarity exactly what needs to be done, everything I say comes out wrong.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“That long sigh again, above us. This time I saw it, moving through the branches. Like the trees were listening; like they would've been sad about us, sad for us, only they'd heard it all so many thousand times before.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“I said I know my shot when I see it. Sometimes you don't even have to see it. Sometimes you feel it coming, screaming down the sky towards you like a meteor.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“If you're good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“If her mind had held even the smallest chance of a future, she would have had no reason to tell me anything at all, whether or not it could send her to prison. But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk off the edges of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's mind; or maybe all they want is is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“I had forgotten that God, or the world, or whatever carves the rules in stone, doesn't give you time off for good behavior.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“Not just the normal back-and-forth. A prickle in the air, a slicing edge. I couldn't tell if it was about her, or just the day that was it, or if it was the squad. Murder is different. The beat goes faster and harder; the tightrope is higher and narrower. One foot wrong, and you're gone.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“The lines of her face, turned up to the sky, would have broken your heart.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“They were amazed by each other, stunned silent, all in the circle of cypresses and night wind. The world outside was gone, nothing. Inside that circle the air was unfurling new colors, it was changing to something that cascaded and fountained pure gold and dazzle, and every breath changed them too.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friendsâ€� secret places.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“For some reason the past—any of our pasts—was solidly off-limits. They were like the creepy rabbits in Watership Down who won't answer any questions beginning with "Where.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“He told me and Rafe to stay put in case you came home, burn the note and get hot water and disinfectant and bandages readyâ€�'

'Which would have come in useful, Rafe said, lighting another cigarette, 'if we'd been delivering a baby in Gone with the Wind. What on earth was he picturing? Home surgery on the kitchen table with Abby's embroidery needle?”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“Some stuff is gonna find a way to happen; once it's got started, you can't stop it no matter what you do.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“How's Alison getting on?'

Conway snorted. 'Tucked up in the sick room like she's dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. She's having a great old time.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Everyone's thought that: maybe even if, maybe we still could, maybe small bits of precious things can be salvaged. No one with cop-on thinks it after the first try. But her voice, quiet and sad, shimmering the air into those pearly colors: for a second I believed it, all over again.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Smoked like it was fuel and he was going to get every last inch to the gallon.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“The shot of cold air hits Becca like it's been fired straight through the glass from the huge outside, wild and magic, pungent with foxes and juniper.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“I said she's not thick, kid. I didn't say she was Professor fucking Moriarty.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“All those years of endless excruciating therapy sessions, of staying vigilant over every move and word and thought; I had been sure I was mended, all the breaks healed, all the blood washed away. I knew I had earned my way to safety. I had believed, beyond any doubt, that that meant I was safe.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbor

“I'm not saying that owning a house makes life into some kind of blissful paradise; simply that it makes the difference between freedom and enslavement.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“In the hazy afternoon light through the windows he looked beautiful and dissolute, shirt open at the collar and streaks of golden hair falling into his eyes, like some Regency buck after a long night's dancing.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren't waiting for.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“It wasn't a remarkable face in any way, but it had a clean-lined sweetness that brought up summer barbecues, golden retrievers, soccer games on new-mown grass, and I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“It does that to you, being a detective. You look at blank space and see gears turning, motives and cunning; nothing looks innocent any more. Most times when you prove away the gears, the blank space looks lovely, peaceful. But that arm: innocent, it looked just as dangerous.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place